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Sis Cunningham
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham (February 19, 1909 – June 27, 2004) was an American musician, best known as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters.
Sis Cunningham was born in Watonga, Oklahoma in Blaine County. She was the daughter of Ada Boyce and William Cunningham, an amateur fiddler, and grew up on a small homestead farm situated on land that was once part of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian Reservation. Her father was a socialist and follower of Eugene Debs, the American Socialist Party leader. As a child, Cunningham learned piano, accordion, and musical arrangement. In 1929, she attended the Weatherford Teachers' College in Oklahoma, now known as Southwestern Oklahoma State University, where she studied music. After graduating from Weatherford, Cunningham went on to the Commonwealth Labor College near Mena, Arkansas, in 1932, where she studied labor organizing and Marxism. During her time there, she also studied labor journalism, labor-farmer union development, and social theatre. During this time, she started to write labor songs. After completing her coursework and moving back to Oklahoma, Cunningham began recruiting for the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.
After Commonwealth, Cunningham became a music teacher at the Southern Labor School for Women near, Asheville, North Carolina in 1937. In late 1939, she was a founding member of the Red Dust Players, an agit-prop group in Oklahoma, that promoted propaganda and political agitation through short plays. Performing throughout the countryside in Oklahoma at union meetings, the Red Dust Players sought to educate tenant-farmers, sharecroppers, and farm workers on how the union could benefit them. Fleeing harassment, she and fellow Communist Party member Gordon Friesen married on July 23, 1941, before fleeing to New York City in November to avoid harassment and arrest on account of the Red Scare.
They moved into the Greenwich Village household known as Almanac House, on 130 West Tenth Street, where their housemates included Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Cunningham was briefly a member of the Almanac Singers, appearing on the 1942 album Dear Mr. President for Keynote Records. After attempting unsuccessfully to start a Detroit, Michigan equivalent of the Almanacs, she took a job in a war plant, while Friesen went to work as a reporter for the Detroit Times.
Cunningham was on the founding committee of People's Songs, a radical musical organization founded in December 1945 in New York City by Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays and others notable members of the folk community. People's Songs went bankrupt in 1948, when it put all its resources into Henry A. Wallace's presidential election. However, the People's Songs Bulletin served as a template for Broadside Magazine that Cunningham later co-founded.
Sis Cunningham was also a songwriter. She wrote "How Can You Keep on Movin' (Unless You Migrate Too)?" which was featured on the New Lost City Ramblers' 1959 album Songs of the Depression. Ry Cooder later recorded the song as a strident march on his album Into the Purple Valley. Unaware of its authorship, Cooder initially credited the song as "traditional" until the omission was brought to his attention, which meant Cunningham was deprived of earnings for the use of her song. The omission was pointed out to him; he and the label corrected the attribution on later pressings.
Her Dust Bowl tale, "My Oklahoma Home," written with her brother Bill Cunningham and performed by Seeger in 1961, fell into oblivion before it was revived by Bruce Springsteen in 2006 for his We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album and subsequent Seeger Sessions Band Tour.
After World War II, Cunningham and Friesen were among the first victims of the anti-communist blacklist. She secured a few bookings as part of the roster of Pete Seeger's booking agency, People's Songs, but due to ill health, poverty, and depression, she largely fell out of the music world for over a decade.
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Sis Cunningham
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham (February 19, 1909 – June 27, 2004) was an American musician, best known as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters.
Sis Cunningham was born in Watonga, Oklahoma in Blaine County. She was the daughter of Ada Boyce and William Cunningham, an amateur fiddler, and grew up on a small homestead farm situated on land that was once part of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian Reservation. Her father was a socialist and follower of Eugene Debs, the American Socialist Party leader. As a child, Cunningham learned piano, accordion, and musical arrangement. In 1929, she attended the Weatherford Teachers' College in Oklahoma, now known as Southwestern Oklahoma State University, where she studied music. After graduating from Weatherford, Cunningham went on to the Commonwealth Labor College near Mena, Arkansas, in 1932, where she studied labor organizing and Marxism. During her time there, she also studied labor journalism, labor-farmer union development, and social theatre. During this time, she started to write labor songs. After completing her coursework and moving back to Oklahoma, Cunningham began recruiting for the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.
After Commonwealth, Cunningham became a music teacher at the Southern Labor School for Women near, Asheville, North Carolina in 1937. In late 1939, she was a founding member of the Red Dust Players, an agit-prop group in Oklahoma, that promoted propaganda and political agitation through short plays. Performing throughout the countryside in Oklahoma at union meetings, the Red Dust Players sought to educate tenant-farmers, sharecroppers, and farm workers on how the union could benefit them. Fleeing harassment, she and fellow Communist Party member Gordon Friesen married on July 23, 1941, before fleeing to New York City in November to avoid harassment and arrest on account of the Red Scare.
They moved into the Greenwich Village household known as Almanac House, on 130 West Tenth Street, where their housemates included Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Cunningham was briefly a member of the Almanac Singers, appearing on the 1942 album Dear Mr. President for Keynote Records. After attempting unsuccessfully to start a Detroit, Michigan equivalent of the Almanacs, she took a job in a war plant, while Friesen went to work as a reporter for the Detroit Times.
Cunningham was on the founding committee of People's Songs, a radical musical organization founded in December 1945 in New York City by Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays and others notable members of the folk community. People's Songs went bankrupt in 1948, when it put all its resources into Henry A. Wallace's presidential election. However, the People's Songs Bulletin served as a template for Broadside Magazine that Cunningham later co-founded.
Sis Cunningham was also a songwriter. She wrote "How Can You Keep on Movin' (Unless You Migrate Too)?" which was featured on the New Lost City Ramblers' 1959 album Songs of the Depression. Ry Cooder later recorded the song as a strident march on his album Into the Purple Valley. Unaware of its authorship, Cooder initially credited the song as "traditional" until the omission was brought to his attention, which meant Cunningham was deprived of earnings for the use of her song. The omission was pointed out to him; he and the label corrected the attribution on later pressings.
Her Dust Bowl tale, "My Oklahoma Home," written with her brother Bill Cunningham and performed by Seeger in 1961, fell into oblivion before it was revived by Bruce Springsteen in 2006 for his We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album and subsequent Seeger Sessions Band Tour.
After World War II, Cunningham and Friesen were among the first victims of the anti-communist blacklist. She secured a few bookings as part of the roster of Pete Seeger's booking agency, People's Songs, but due to ill health, poverty, and depression, she largely fell out of the music world for over a decade.